1ST CALL FOR PAPERS (9 January, 2006) Resource-Scarce Language Engineering http://altiplano.emich.edu/resource_scarce/ 31 July - 4 August, 2006 organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information ESSLLI 2006 http://esslli2006.lcc.uma.es/ 31 July - 11 August, 2006 in Malaga Workshop Organizer: Edward Garrett Workshop Purpose: This workshop will bring together scientists from academia and industry, as well as advanced PhD students, to present and discuss research on the theoretical and practical challenges of engineering resource-scarce languages. We intend to provide an inclusive forum for exchanging ideas on a broad range of topics in areas represented by ESSLLI, including basic text processing, speech analysis, and machine translation. Workshop Topics: Seen through one lens, "resource-scarce languages" are languages for which few digital resources exist; and thus, languages whose computerization poses unique challenges. Through another lens, "resource-scarce languages" are languages with limited financial, political, and legal resources, languages that lack the clout or global importance of the world's major languages. In spite of these challenges, resource-scarce languages and their speakers are not being ignored. Individuals, governments, and companies alike are busy developing technologies and tools to support such languages. They are driven by a variety of motivations - from the desire among academics and community activists to preserve or revitalize endangered or threatened languages - to the desire by governments to promote minority languages - to the need by other governments to detect hostile chatter in diverse tongues - to the strategy of some companies to enhance their stature in emerging markets such as China and South America. Recognizing the above trend, this workshop will serve as a forum for the discussion of academic and industrial research on resource- scarce language engineering. Possible topics include but are not limited to: - multilingual text processing and the Unicode Standard - machine translation and speech recognition with minimal training data - rapid portability of existing language technologies to new - languages - the use of multilingual resources for monolingual annotation - the annotation of new language data on the basis of knowledge of related languages - coping with data of inconsistent or uneven quality or coverage In addition, there will be a shared task on a specific resource- scarce language - Tibetan (details to be announced separately). Submission Details: Authors are invited to submit a paper describing completed work in the area of the workshop. Each submission will be read by at least two members of the program committee, and will be evaluated according to its scientific merit, its relevance to the workshop, and the degree to which its ideas are expressed fully yet concisely. Submissions of any length will be accepted, but acceptable formats are limited to postscript and pdf. Papers sent in other formats will be subject to immediate disposal. Please send your submission electronically to by the deadline listed below. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published by ESSLLI. Workshop Format: This workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the first week of ESSLLI. There will be at least 2-3 slots for paper presentation and discussion plus one invited talk per session. On the first day the workshop organizer will give a general introduction to the topic. Invited Speakers: Tom Emerson, Basis Technology Corporation John Goldsmith, University of Chicago Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Cathy Wissink, Microsoft Corporation Workshop Programme Committee: Deborah Anderson, University of California, Berkeley Emily Bender, University of Washington Steven Bird, University of Melbourne Alan W. Black, Carnegie Mellon University Sean Fulop, California State University, Fresno Andrew Hardie, Lancaster University Baden Hughes, University of Melbourne William Lewis, University of Washington Steven Loomis, IBM Joel Martin, National Research Council, Canada Mike Maxwell, University of Maryland Tony McEnery, Lancaster University Manuela Noske, Microsoft Corporation Charles Schafer, Johns Hopkins University Tanja Schultz, Carnegie Mellon University Important Dates: Submissions : April 7, 2006 Notification : April 28, 2006 Full paper deadline: May 19, 2006 Final program : June 30, 2006 Workshop Dates : July 31 - August 4, 2006 Local Arrangements: All workshop participants including the presenters will be required to register for ESSLLI. The registration fee for authors presenting a paper will correspond to the early student/workshop speaker registration fee. Moreover, a number of additional fee waiver grants might be made available by the local organizing committee on a competitive basis and workshop participants are eligible to apply for those. There will be no reimbursement for travel costs or accommodation. Workshop speakers who have difficulty in finding funding should contact the local organizing committee to ask for the possibilities of a grant. Further Information: About the workshop: http://altiplano.emich.edu/resource_scarce/ About ESSLLI: http://esslli2006.lcc.uma.es/